A common allergy in young children, which often goes away as they get older. Although you might have to avoid egg strictly to begin with, many children with egg allergy can eat cooked foods containing small amounts of egg eg cake or pancake as they get older, even though they might still react to sloppy scrambled egg. You should ask your health professional before you try this.
Testing
There are blood and skin tests available for egg allergy (
see our page on Testing), but often testing is not necessary if there has been a very typical reaction.
Avoidance
Egg gets used in lots of different foods so it can be difficult to avoid. It can be used in bread and biscuits, it can be brushed on top of pastry eg sausage rolls, it gets used in desserts and sweets eg Tunnock’s Tea cakes, Cadbury’s Crème Eggs. It can be used in pasta, custard and ice cream – but you can usually get these without any egg in them. See our patient information leaflet. See also Food Labelling for more information about labels.
Some vaccines are made using egg, but for the routine vaccines including MMR and nasal/injectable influenza (“flu”) vaccines, the vast majority of egg allergic children can get them in the usual way, with no need for additional precautions. National advice states that MMR should be given to everyone, unless you have had an anaphylactic reaction to MMR vaccine itself in the past, and that influenza vaccine can be given to an egg allergic child as long as they have not had “severe anaphylaxis to egg” in the past (there are some other contraindications to nasal influenza vaccine however, eg wheezing on the day of immunisation).
Risk of anaphylaxis
If you have the immediate type of allergy to egg, then there is a risk of anaphylaxis. Your doctor can prescribe an antihistamine and give you an allergy plan in case you have an unexpected reaction. Severe reactions in young infants are however very rare, mainly because once you know about the allergy, it is relatively straightforward to keep you child away from egg. Once a child can eat some cooked or baked egg in foods without a problem, the risk of anaphylaxis virtually disappears.
Prognosis
Most children with egg allergy will grow out of it, although it may take several years. Your health professional will recommend when to try reintroducing egg in a careful step by step way (sometimes called an “egg ladder”), a dietician can give further advice about this. In high risk cases, repeating allergy tests over a year or two can be useful to see if things seem to be getting better or not.
Other allergies
Most children allergic to egg are not allergic to anything else, but the risk of being allergic to another food eg peanut is higher. This is not however a reason to avoid trying anything new.See Weaning and Antenatal page.